The Great Cultural Divide
Between Nihilists and Invitationalists
The culture wars gives the impression that the great cultural divide today is between the progressive left and the conservative right, but I think the deeper divide is between those who are fundamentally nihilist in their cultural logic and those who are what I want to call hopeful invitationalists. And on that account, both the progressive left and conservative right tend toward nihilistic cultural logic.
I don’t mean to suggest that either side believes in “nothingness,” but that they have accepted the premise that persuasion is impossible, power is everything, and the human person’s agency is irrelevant. This is roughly the thesis of James Davison Hunter’s book, Democracy and Solidarity, which I highly recommend. The conclusion of this nihilism is the belief that the other side cannot be lived with but should be removed or disenfranchised. As Christians, this is not an acceptable position for us to hold. It is the sin of despair and pride and it leads to hatred of our neighbor. Instead, we must learn to be invitational people, people who invite others to the truth for their good and God’s glory.
When Hillary Clinton said her infamous line about a “basket of deplorables,” people were rightly outraged that she would categorize “half” of Trump supporters as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” It’s one thing to criticize an opponent, but to condemn a wide swath of voters was beyond the pale.
We find Trump using similarly dehumanizing rhetoric, but his focus is on immigrants and foreigners, “poisoning the blood” of our country. The idea is fundamentally the same. There is a group in our country who is Other who must be removed because they are fundamentally evil.
Unfortunately, such belief is now commonplace. A 2024 survey found that nearly half of the US electorate believe that the other party is not just wrong for their political views but downright evil. And how can you negotiate with evil? You don’t. You destroy, deport, disenfranchise, suppress, and cancel evil. And as Hunter points out in his book, this is precisely what we have seen in the last decade or so. Both on the right and the left, there has been a move to shut people down, cancel them. I still live with the concern that one day I’ll cross some invisible line that will trigger someone in some way that will cancel me (not that there haven’t been attempts…). Anyone writing publicly today lives with this reality.
Another part of this nihilism is the belief that the individual has no meaningful agency. They are pawns to be manipulated by algorithms, techniques, bureaucracies, ads, movements, politicians, experts, memes, the marketplace, and so on. The individual doesn’t need to be persuaded of the good, they need to be coerced or even corralled into line. Propaganda is paramount. That’s how we reach people. And individuals are used to spread and create propaganda themselves for these causes. But we don’t treat people as rational agents capable of thinking for themselves through complex issues to come to the right conclusion about the good. They need to be appealed to emotionally, viscerally—through memes and lifestyle models.
We see this in the growing influence and focus on Executive Power by both parties and their culture war advocates. The direct access to power the individual agent had through Congress has been almost entirely shut down or ignored. Now things are done through the President (whichever party is in office) and executive orders and maybe the Supreme Court might hold him in check. (Some) on the right want a Christian Caesar. (Some) on the left are similarly happy with a benevolent authoritarian. Everyone wants someone who can get things done. And that means not bothering with Congress and the People.
We also see this in the rhetorical posture in the public square. Few people try to persuade others of their position. Instead, they dunk on others, they pose for the watching audience, they build their own clout, they “bring receipts” they appeal to their side, they insult the other person—they do everything but invite someone to reconsider their position. There are notable exceptions, of course, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
As I said in my title, I think the real divide is not going to be between the right and the left over the culture war, but between those who choose the way of nihilism and those who chose the way of hope and invitation. And that’s what I would like to argue for. Nihilism is the sin of despair, because it is a failure to hope all things about your neighbor. It is a failure to hope that God can bring about his peace through his means, and so you are trying to bring them about yourself (in that sense, there is a bit of presumption mixed in here, too). Nihilism also ends up being a failure to love your neighbor, to see them as made in the image of God and worthy of your attention and respect, rather than a mere means to a political end. And so the response to this sin, the act of repentance needs to be a turning away from coercion and toward invitation in hope that they will receive the good.
Our job is simple. We must know what is good (God, God’s will, and the Good News). And we must desire to share that good with others. Our desire should always be in hope. We don’t know what the Holy Spirit will do in the lives of others, whether we are trying to persuade someone of the injustice of assisted suicide or the beauty of families, we have no idea how one seed of Truth about God’s creation might be used by God to bring them closer to his Kingdom. But we do have an obligation to desire the good for our neighbor. Whatever our neighbor looks like. Wherever our neighbor is from. Whatever their political views are. When God gives us opportunities to speak with truth and love, we are responsible for trying to persuade them of the truth for their good. Not so that we can be praised. Not so that our side will win. Not so that the culture war vibe will shift. But because we love our neighbor and desire their good.
The key to all of this is invitation. We are inviting someone in to consider changing their mind. We recognize them as human agents, and so they may choose not to, but we also respect and love them enough to give them the reasons why they should change their minds. This is what I call being an invitationalist.
Of course, this does not mean that our neighbor will be persuaded. In fact, in my experience, our neighbor may be offended or shocked or put off by the truth. Christ was a stumbling block for some. Why should we be surprised when we speak the truth in love and people still find ways to be offended or to cling to their false beliefs? And this is especially the case because we have so little in our shared cultural vocabulary to build upon anymore. But I think we should still appeal to reason, natural law, and the Word and invite people to hold to those standards, because they are the standards God has given us.
I don’t have any grand visions of this divide going away as people return to respecting human agency and persons and seeking to persuade one another. But that is not my concern. My concern is with the Church. What are we doing? Are we participating in the nihilism of the age? I’m sad to say that I see it happen all the time. Or are we engaging in hope-filled persuasion, inviting even our opponents to change their minds, to repent, and see the truth for their own good and God’s glory?
Well certain political theologies have deliberately argued that the Gospel has no impact on political technique, which establishes many of the nihilistic conclusions.
I mean, I recognize my own attitudes around politics as faults, and I think that ultimately I'm trying to believe in a kind of hopeful, invitational view of the world, in the sense that I'd like to be a hopeful Christian universalist who believes God reaches everyone - but that's sort of shifting that beyond the present and beyond what I can imagine now. But the thing is, while she shouldn't have said it like that, I think history has sort of borne out what Hillary was saying about Trump supporters. If we're never allowed to lodge moral responsibility with voters, then I think we're not taking democracy very seriously. And if we're just unwilling to do that because it makes one unpopular, then that's just salesmanship and pandering, in which case we're no better than the people who only say things that will sell and not offend their customers, which is another way of saying we have no integrity and deserve no respect. If we come away from this whole national crisis somehow intact, and we don't internalize the idea that some voters were responsible, we're just going to keep repeating it. That's a huge part of what went wrong after the Civil War, there was a collective faltering when it came to the hard part of holding people responsible.